Shadowing Practice: Something Weird Happens When You See How Connected Everything Is - Learn English Speaking with Video
Creating lesson...
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This video is sponsored by Planet Wild.
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They're essentially crowdfunding for nature.
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Every month, their community funds a new nature protection mission, and they document it through videos on YouTube.
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But more on that later.
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There's not a single person in the world that knows how to make this toaster.
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I know that might seem impossible, but it's true.
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Let me explain.
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In 2011, British designer and writer Thomas Thwaites tried to build a toaster from scratch.
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Nothing crazy, just a simple electric toaster, equivalent to any cheap one you could find at a department store.
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He figured, especially with his design experience, how hard could it be?
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Turns out, for one person, it's impossible.
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When he bought and opened a toaster to base his own on, Thwaites was immediately distraught.
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Despite it being a cheap $6 toaster, there were 400 parts made of more than 100 different materials.
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How was he possibly going to acquire or make all the materials and parts needed?
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He had little to no idea where to obtain things like iron ore, plastic, copper, and rubber.
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And so he began talking to professors and experts, reading up on the history and logistics of various kinds of material sourcing and manufacturing.
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Over the following nine months, Deweyts found himself on an obscure journey across industries, the world, and history.
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He got copper from an abandoned mine on the island of Anglesey in Wales, obtained iron ore from Clearwell Caves in England, and then tried to smelt it using a homemade furnace,
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extracted mica off mountains in Scotland, and attempted to make plastic from potato starch in his backyard.
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In the end, after nine months and thousands of dollars, Dwight's essentially had nothing in the form of a fully functioning toaster.
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He couldn't figure out how to make rubber from scratch, so the wires had no insulation, and after five seconds of the toaster being plugged in and ran, the heating element melted itself.
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Thwaites' entire experiment, which would come to be known as the Toaster Project, was inspired by a scene in Douglas Adams' novel series, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,
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where a 20th century man finds himself stranded on a planet with technologically primitive people.
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He assumes that with his experience with advanced technology, he'll be able to become a kind of emperor of the planet and transform its conditions.
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Instead, he soon realizes, although he originally came from a world which had cars and computers and ballet, and Armagnac.
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He didn't, by himself, know how any of it worked.
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He couldn't do it.
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Left to his own devices, he couldn't build a toaster.
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He could just about make a sandwich, and that was it.
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Without the rest of modern society, the intricate network of people, knowledge, and systems, each with their own essential node in the process of civilization and its products,
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the man really couldn't do much of anything in the modern technological sense.
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The Weitz project showed that this is also true for each of us on this planet right now.
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Think about every object you use on a daily basis, from simple household items like forks,
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bottles, and couches, to intricate devices like phones, computers, cars, and toasters.
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Every single one of them have massive intricate lineages of conception, design, production, and distribution required for them to wind up in each of our hands and homes.
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As individuals, not only understanding, but carrying out the complete process of production for any object or technology,
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let alone all the objects we use, would be impossible.
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With exception to simple, primitive tools, we would not accomplish much of anything on our own.
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Consider that in the case of a simple toaster, the copper for the wiring might be mined in Chile, processed in China, and then sent elsewhere for assembly.
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The nickel that makes up the heating element might be mined in Indonesia, and then sent to China to be refined.
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The iron ore might be mined in Australia, which still needs to be smelted into iron, refined into steel, and then fabricated into the parts that make up the toaster's body and frame.
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This goes for every part and material of the 400 plus parts that make up a simple toaster.
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Hundreds, if not thousands, of individuals are essential to the process.
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Miners, designers, engineers, chemists, manufacturers, business operators, deliverers, and so on.
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Most of whom only know how to carry out their part of the process.
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Almost everything you use
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and touch on an average day is a kind of miracle forged out of the material of the earth
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and the human mind.
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Human engineering facilitated by vast networks of manufacturing, brought to you by carefully orchestrated distribution channels,
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all of which originated from human thoughts and ideas.
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In the words of poet John Donne, No man is an island entire of itself.
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Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.
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beginning of everything.
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One thing that Thwaites discovered that is even more interesting
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and potentially existential crisis inducing is that the smaller the scale you want to work on, the further back in time you have to go.
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Every man-made object and technology is not only connected to the web of modern industry, but also to the web of human history.
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The history of everything.
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Every new idea, every new design, every new object and technology is built on the back of prior ideas,
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designs, and technologies, all the way back to the first and simplest ideas and technologies.
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Man learned to create fire hundreds of thousands of years ago, so that now we can toast slices of bread equally on both sides at the same time.
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One does not exist without the other.
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Nothing exists without everything that led to it.
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But where did everything come from to begin with?
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Where did it all start?
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Humanity itself does not exist in a vacuum.
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We are a species in the context of nature and evolution and the world.
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And yet we are apparently alone in creating fire, forging swords, constructing buildings, flying planes,
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in building computers and digital intelligence systems, and everything else.
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But why is this the case?
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Why and how did humanity separate so significantly from the apparent nature of everything else?
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The answer is, in large part, found in one of the most unsuspecting and almost humorous places.
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The thumb.
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The opposable appendage sticking out the sides of each of our hands.
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By appearance alone, the opposable thumb might seem to be a modest biological mutation, but this little appendage changed the world completely,
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allowing for a whole new realm of existence.
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All the networks of civilization that we experience today, every technology and man-made object, the state of the world, our endless yearn made tangible,
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is in large part the product of this thing on our hands.
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With it brought almost everything else.
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The Thumb Brain In 2025, a study out of the University of Reading in the UK,
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titled Human Dexterity and brains evolved hand in hand, explored the relationship between the size of opposable thumbs and the size of brains.
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The researchers analyzed nearly 100 living and fossil primate species, including humans, chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans,
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macaques, and other ancient hominin species.
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What they found surprised them.
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Longer thumbs not only appear to have a correlation with larger brain sizes, but the part of the brain that is bigger relative to longer thumbs is the neocortex,
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the part of the brain responsible for higher order functions like conscious thought, sensory perception, spatial reasoning, and complex language.
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This suggests that these two things potentially grow together, the thumb and the neocortex.
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On the face of it, this might seem kind of absurd.
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How or why would the thumb have any direct relationship with consciousness, with language, and with the complexity of thought.
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Though certainly bizarre, after examining it further, it makes a lot of sense.
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Without thumbs in some form, we wouldn't be able to meaningfully create or engage in anything that requires gripping, grasping, holding, or pinching.
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This includes early primitive tools like hammerstones, axes, sticks, and spears.
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If humans never evolved thumbs, these tools would likely have never existed in the forms they did, and tools would have likely remained extremely simplistic.
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Consider the tools of other species without opposable thumbs.
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Crows bend and shape twigs, finches use cactus spines, otters use rocks, and elephants direct branches with their trunks.
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All of which is extremely simplistic, imprecise, and limited.
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This of course matters a lot.
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If human tools remained equally imprecise and primitive, then early humans would have been less precise in what they could do and build with such tools.
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And if humans were less precise and more simplistic in their interfacing with the world,
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then the mental modeling required to engage with tools in the world would have also remained more simplistic and minimal.
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A species doesn't need complex terms and conceptual modeling for a world that they poke and smash.
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But for a world that comprises increasing intricacy and strategy, it does.
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Complex tools seem to apply a kind of pressure on the brain to expand.
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As the possibility and complexity of tools increase, so too must cognition.
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And as cognition increases, so too can the complexity of tools.
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What seems to be the result of a limited ability to grasp and grip isn't a slower development of tools, but it results in them never really getting off the ground floor.
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Consciousness thus never really expands and civilization never begins.
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But of course, we did evolve thumbs.
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We learned to grasp, grip, pinch and create.
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We created axes and hammer stones, then spears and bow and arrows, then plows and the written word, then cars and planes and computers.
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Each of these creations expanded the possibilities and needs of the human species.
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At each point, the complexity of our relationship with the world grew.
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And at each point, so too did our cognitive abilities, creating a feedback loop where every cognitive enhancement has led to a greater ability to create more advanced tools
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and technologies which continues to lead to cognitive enhancements, so on and so forth.
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What have we done?
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In the early 1890s, there were new campus buildings being constructed at Ohio State University.
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As part of the new developments, a large central grass space was created that would come to be known as the Oval.
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For years, there were no official walkways in the Oval, just an open field.
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As students began walking across the grass to get to and from different buildings, however, they began choosing specific routes that were shortest or most convenient.
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Soon, dirt trails began to appear on these routes as the students wore the grass down from frequent walking.
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Then, even more students began to walk the same routes, now with the addition of a visual Trail.
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These worn down trails are what are known as desire paths.
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They appear all over the world in cities, campuses, and parks for similar reasons.
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By the early 1900s at Ohio State University, the university based their placement of concrete sidewalks in the oval off these desire paths.
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The outcome was a strange asymmetrical pattern of sidewalks sprawling across the grass field, each path meeting at certain centers and connection points,
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altogether creating a a kind of webbing of apparent random connectivity forged by the continual patterns of human desire and goals.
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We so often feel like we are choosing where we are going, what we are doing, and why.
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But history is a desire path.
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The world is a network of these apparently random connections forged by the patterns of human desire and goals,
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through which we each walk every day and every moment.
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The development of tools and technologies don't merely affect how we tangibly interact with the world, but also how we understand and think about it abstractly.
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We each not only arrive with our thumbs, but we arrive with our particular cognitive models of the world, a particular size of the neocortex,
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and an understanding of phenomena developed and facilitated by a state of technology and a corresponding state of culture.
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Thumbs did not merely lead to spears, spoons, writing, toasters, and cell phones, but they They also, in some meaningful sense, led to the creation of religions,
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of philosophies, of ideologies, of beliefs.
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Where does everything go from here?
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Before Thumbs, animals couldn't grasp or grip the world.
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Thumbs evolved as a way to literally do this, to gain greater control over the world and its inherent chaos and uncertainty.
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But ironically, through what Thumbs have allowed us to do and create and understand, we have We have mostly discovered how little control we can ever have over anything.
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We have built an unfathomably complex civilization.
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Cultures and industries, ideologies and religions and philosophies, math and science.
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We have created fire and toasters and smartphones, all to have no control over or understanding of the very things and systems we built.
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The modern world is a kind of self-propelling network of desires formed from the walking paths of the humans
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and species before us.
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Modern industry and culture move forward, producing new technologies and new ideas that appear in our hands and our homes and our minds.
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And yet, we never really can see or understand the complete process of any of it, where it all comes from, how it's made, and why.
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Ultimately, each of our existences are a network of contingencies that no one person or group ever had a say in,
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ever started, or can ever fully understand or take control of.
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Our beliefs and ideas are really not so dissimilar from a toaster, made of hundreds if not thousands of parts and materials sourced from all over the world and tracing deep into history.
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What would we have been without thumbs?
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What would the world have become?
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Perhaps something entirely alien to us.
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Or perhaps something incredibly basic and simple.
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We'll never know.
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But we can know that the world that we have created appears entirely alien to everything else in the cosmos.
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A beautiful and terrifying array of technological and cognitive possibility.
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Of desire and need.
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Of good and bad.
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Of intelligence and ignorance.
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We don't know where we are going or why.
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We don't know why the whole process started.
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We don't know what our thumbs and minds will hold next.
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But in any and every moment, we can know just how absurd and improbable holding anything is.
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From the simplest to the grandest of moments and objects.
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For a toaster to arrive on your counter.
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For a pen to arrive in your drawer.
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For shoes to arrive on your feet.
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A phone in your pocket.
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A concept in your mind.
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and a thumb on your hand.
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Through our thumbs and minds, we have changed the world completely.
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This is no doubt equated to many miraculous things, but it is also equated to many devastating things.
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We must use our thumbs and minds, our capabilities and power, as much as we do to create and innovate, to help preserve and protect this planet, to undo damage we've done,
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and to help nature in ways that only we as humans can.
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That's one of the reasons why I joined Planet Wild, and why I'm so thrilled to be partnering with them for this video.
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Planet Wild is a community-based nature protection organization that makes it possible for each of us to help protect nature.
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Every month, its community of more than 25,000 members, including myself, funds a new carefully selected mission,
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like restoring forests, bringing back endangered species, and protecting oceans.
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In under 30 days, you can see your impact as Planet Wild shares update videos right here on YouTube.
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You can also observe the interactive map on the app
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and get insights on data and funding and earn badges for your contributions.
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What I love about Planet Wild is that you can feel and see your impact directly.
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It's not just an occasional email.
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It's a community that you participate in and watch develop.
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One recent mission involved helping restore the world's largest tropical lake, Lake Victoria.
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This lake supports around 45 million people and over 600 freshwater species.
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Right next to it is a forest that helps support it, which has been severely degraded over recent years.
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Planet Wild is helping reverse this by planting 80,000 trees
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and funding the necessary tech to make sure the forest and surrounding ecosystem can thrive long term.
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Perhaps one of the most impressive feats humanity has ever accomplished, of which Planet Wild is at the forefront, is bringing nature back to life.
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Help us continue to do this with Planet Wild by scanning the QR code or clicking the link in the description.
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As a special gift, the first 100 people to sign up using my code, Pursuit8, will get their first month paid for by me.
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You can cancel anytime.
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Give whatever amount you can, big or small.
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And if you want to see Planet Wild in action, check out their mission at Lake Victoria, linked below.
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And of course, as always, thank you so much for watching in general, and see you next video.
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Thank you.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This video has 196 sentences and 2878 words to shadow. The speech runs for 17:24. The speaker talks at a natural 165 words per minute, close to everyday conversation. Only 81% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is demanding.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 less common words from the video, with pronunciation and meaning:
- thumb /ˈθʌm/ (noun) — The shortest and thickest digit of the hand that for humans has the most mobility and can be made to oppose (moved to touch) all of the other fingers.
- arrive /əˈɹaɪv/ (verb) — To reach; to get to a certain place.
- cognitive /ˈkɑɡ.nɪ.tɪv/ (adjective) — Relating to the part of mental functions that deals with logic, as opposed to affective which deals with emotions.
- grass /ɡɹɑːs/ (noun) — Any plant of the family Poaceae, characterized by leaves that arise from nodes in the stem and leaf bases that wrap around the stem, especially those grown as…
- complexity /kəmˈplɛk.sɪ.ti/ (noun) — The state of being complex; intricacy; entanglement.
- civilization /ˌsɪv.ɪ.laɪˈzeɪ.ʃən/ (noun) — An organized culture encompassing many communities, often on the scale of a nation or a people; a stage or system of social, political, or technical…
- evolve /ɪˈvɑlv/ (verb) — To move (something) in regular procession through a system.
- primitive /ˈpɹɪmɪtɪv/ (noun) — An original or primary word; a word not derived from another, as opposed to derivative.
- humanity /hjuˈmænɪti/ (noun) — Humankind; human beings as a group.
- copper /ˈkɒpə/ (noun) — A reddish-brown metallic chemical element (symbol Cu) with the atomic number 29; also, the metal made up of this element.
- grip /ˈɡɹɪp/ (noun) — A hold or way of holding, particularly with the hand.
- oval /ˈoʊvəl/ (noun) — A two-dimensional one.
- grasp /ɡɹæsp/ (verb) — To grip; to take hold, particularly with the hand.
- forge /fɔɹd͡ʒ/ (noun) — A furnace or hearth where metals are heated prior to hammering them into shape.
- spear /spɪə̯(ɹ)/ (noun) — A long stick with a sharp tip used as a weapon for throwing or thrusting, or anything used to make a thrusting motion.
Phrasal verbs you will hear
- come from (verb) — To have as one's origin, birthplace or nationality.
- make up /ˌmeɪk ˈʌp/ (verb) — To constitute, to compose.
- carry out /ˈkæ.ɹi aʊt/ (verb) — To hold while moving it out.
- think about /ˈθɪŋk əˌbaʊt/ (verb) — To ponder.
- back in (verb) — To reverse a vehicle into a space.
- bring back /ˈbɹɪŋ bæk/ (verb) — To fetch something.
- build on /bɪldɑn/ (verb) — To add additional elements or components to (a framework, a concept, a device, etc.) in order to extend it.
- check out (verb) — To record the departure or withdrawal of someone or something (such as guests, employees, books, etc.).
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 18 contractions and reduced forms, such as couldn't, don't, didn't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: thumb /ˈθʌm/, mathematics /mæθ(.ə)ˈmæt.ɪks/, altogether /ɔl.tuˈɡɛð.ɚ/, thrill /θɹɪl/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: civilization /ˌsɪv.ɪ.laɪˈzeɪ.ʃən/, essentially /ɪˈsɛnʃəli/, potentially /pəˈtɛnʃ(ə)li/, consciousness /ˈkɑnʃəsnəs/, accomplish /əˈkɑm.plɪʃ/
- Long words — get the stress right: complexity /kəmˈplɛk.sɪ.ti/, civilization /ˌsɪv.ɪ.laɪˈzeɪ.ʃən/, humanity /hjuˈmænɪti/, essentially /ɪˈsɛnʃəli/, potentially /pəˈtɛnʃ(ə)li/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like thumb, arrive, cognitive.
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | have never existed · has led · have allowed |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | is sponsored · being plugged · be known |
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.